Behind the Bastards - Part One: The (Male) Doctor Who Redesigned Vaginas

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Robert is joined by Courtney Kocak to discuss Dr. James Burt.Footnotes: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/11/us/charges-against-doctor-bring-ire-and-questions.html  https://www.medicalbag.com/home/features/despicable-doctors/the-love-surgeon-was-nothing-but-a-brutal-butcher/  http://www.patient-safety.com/burt.htm  https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ohio-woman-writes-book-love-doctor-mutilated-sex/story?id=17897317  https://sci-hub.do/10.1007/s10508-012-0030-8 https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-08-25-9103030670-story.html https://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-sex-ed-america-81001  https://red.library.usd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1118&context=honors-thesis  https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-love-surgeon/9781978800953 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have we opened the podcast yet? You did it. We're here. Robert Evans, champion podcast opener, winner of the Nobel Prize for starting his own podcast with atonal grunting. This is a podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history.

And today we have a real doozy of a son of a bitch to talk about. And to talk about this just exquisite asshole is Courtney Kosak. Courtney, you are one of the hosts of Private Parts Unknown, and you have an essay collection coming out soon. Is that correct? Well, I'm hoping to sell it. Yes. It's been written. That is the first step. Totally. Yeah, it's about hocking t-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour. That sounds like a life experience. Yeah, 21.

Oh boy. I'm just going to guess a lot of Keystone light involved in that tour. Good guess. I too went to college in the early aughts. Courtney, how do you feel about obstetricians? Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. They're helpful people.

Can be helpful people. Can be. Can be helpful people. Key word on this podcast. Key word. Yeah. How do you feel about like vaginas? It just is like in terms of the way they're structured. I did previously tell court that I picked her for this episode specifically. I'm honored already.

Oh yeah, just wait. Yeah, Courtney, how do you feel about vaginas? Like structurally. Structurally. I don't have a problem with vaginas. I feel like society maybe does. Society has some issues with them. I think they seem fine.

But what if I were to tell you, the decades ago, some random dude with a medical degree decided he'd figured out a better way to design vaginas. And then what if I were to tell you that he decided to test his theories by surgically altering the vaginas of thousands of women without asking for their consent? No. No. That's a bad one. Yeah, that is the story we're going to tell today.

It is the tale of Dr. James Burt who sucked and unless he's died by the time this episode runs, still sucks. I think he's alive in Florida still, which makes sense as to where this guy would be. He's really, he hits the, he hits the the die factor of shitty American places because he was, he did all of his crimes in Ohio and then he fled to Florida when he got caught. So it's a real perfect story. Oh my God. Is he still down in Florida redesigning vaginas? He is. No, no, no, he is not allowed to do anything vaguely medical ever again.

Oh God. Well, that's good. Yeah, I mean, that's broadly positive. He didn't get the punishment that I think would have been fair. But he's, he's, he's maybe still alive. It's kind of hard to tell. He's kept a low profile since getting caught. Well, getting caught is the wrong word because he wrote a book about what he was doing and had no shame in it.

And it's a, it's a tale. It's a tale. Are you ready to hear the story of James, doctor? Sorry, James Burt. Oh, be respectful. Yeah, I can't wait. The man earned his MD, you know. Okay.

So James Caird Burt Jr. was born on August 29th, 1921 in Dayton, Ohio, which is already one strike against him, right? Yeah, for sure. He's coming out the bat committing a crime. The crime of being from Ohio. Now I, yeah, anyway, James was one of two children born to Benjamin and Stella. His dad worked in a manufacturing company as a superintendent and his mom was a homemaker. We have vanishingly little detail on his childhood,

but we can make some assumptions based on when and where he grew up. He was likely raised in an environment of casual pervasive misogyny and male supremacy. Sex probably was not discussed openly by his parents or in school. The first sex ed in a major American city was implemented in Chicago in 1913, about eight years before James was born. And the program was so controversial that it was shuttered almost immediately as a result of outcry from the Catholic church. They launched a massive protest campaign,

forced the Chicago superintendent of schools, Ellie Young to resign. I was going to say Midwest. I was like, that seems like a very not happening. I mean, it's simultaneously like, yeah, it makes sense that it would get shut down, but also like, good on you, Chicago. They tried, right? Like they tried before LA or anywhere, you know, they gave it a shot.

Didn't work, but you got to give them, got to give Ellie Young points for trying at least, not the Catholic church. Don't give the Catholic church points for a lot. No. I know we both thought of things to say, but sometimes it's best not to make those Catholic church jokes. Throwing their dick around everywhere. That did get them in a lot of trouble eventually. But not enough at the same time.

What we're saying is, Shanae O'Connor was right. So yeah, the federal government would not take any kind of stance on the matter of like, whether or not sex ed was a good idea until 1918. And what forced their hand was the sheer devastating frequency of STDs among American soldiers during World War One. Like the government was like, we don't, we don't want any part in this. And then our military readiness was compromised by fucking. It was suddenly an issue that had to be dealt with.

Just like, oh my God, we're losing a lot of men from venereal disease. Dudes are itching themselves off the battlefields. This is horrible. Yeah, they are leaping off of battleships and into the ocean to quiet the crabs. We should probably say something. The Chamberlain-Con Act was America's first federal law regarding sex education. And it was passed to provide funding to teach soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea. This had the positive impact of sparing large numbers of Americans to view sex as a public health issue,

which is broadly speaking an improvement from where things were. It also inspired school districts around the nation to copy the military and hosting sex ed programs in secondary schools. And this was a thoroughly mixed bag. Because they weren't teaching how to have healthy sex. They weren't teaching about how sex can function in a relationship. They weren't like, it was just purely trying to scare kids about VD, you know? Like that was the whole, all of sex ed was just trying to frighten children

about the fact that their genitals were going to rot off if they had sex. Was everyone still on the abstinence only? Like was that happening in this era? I think that attitude was so pervasive that they didn't have an abstinence only movement. It was just assumed that like, yeah, it's bad to fuck before marriage. And obviously all of the men are, but like, I don't even think there was a movement because it was so such a pervasive like accepted thing. Yeah.

Throughout the 1920s, when James Burt was a little kid, sex ed grew increasingly common. When he was in school, he probably watched a film called The Gift of Life from the terrifyingly named American Social Hygiene Association, which is, yeah, that's a nightmare organization name right there. The movie warned children about the quote solitary vice, which was masturbation and cautioned. Masturbation may seriously hinder a boy's progress towards vigorous manhood. It is a selfish, childish, stupid habit. Interesting word choice with the vigorous. Love that.

Yeah, vigorous. Also, don't you think masturbation, that would help prevent VD? I don't, you know, we talk about this in the Kellogg episodes, which are airing the week we record this, but like, there was a widespread belief that it would kill you, that like it would drive you insane and you would die. Not totally wrong, but... I mean, depends on how you do it, I guess. Yeah, you'll also notice that they specifically say like masturbation is the thing that boys do that is bad for them.

This is because even discussing, even too like, even discussing female sexuality in order to like discourage masturbation was kind of too risque, you know, like acknowledging that it happened would be a bridge too far for these people. Now, thanks to an English teacher named Lucy Curtis, a number of secondary school teachers in the 20s and 30s also attempted to teach sex ed through English literature, which allowed them to avoid talking directly about biology. Instead, they would draw comparisons to health lessons, sex health lessons from passages and classical works. Ms. Curtis advised teachers, quote, Read to them Lancelot's wild, passionate quest for the Holy Grail,

and they will enter into the bitter experience of a soul which has rendered itself incapable of receiving the full spiritual blessing through the sin of yielding to impure desire. So like, you're gonna teach them about fucking, have them read King Arthur's Tales. They'll understand that the Holy Grail is sex. Totally. Yeah, that'll work. It's why the Crucible stopped our generation from fucking. Yeah.

So in the 1930s, when James Burt was a teenager and had his adolescence, sex ed grew increasingly formal. The U.S. Department of Education started publishing materials to train teachers during this period. Most of these early classes focused entirely on warning children against masturbation and scaring them with exaggerated stories of the dangers of STDs. Female masturbation was seldom discussed. Even teaching about the negatives of sex could be dangerous. In 1933, when Mexico's socialist government proposed compulsory sex ed for public schools, Mexico City erupted into riots.

So there were riots in a few countries about the concept of teaching sex ed that wasn't just don't. Oh shit. Yeah, people murdered each other over this stuff. Good shit. And of course, Mexico City, the Catholic Church was behind that one too. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now, the most influential progressive voice on sex ed during James's teen years would have been Margaret Sanger,

who is a very problematic figure on her own, was a big eugenicist. But Sanger also made huge waves for arguing that sex, for the sake of pleasure, was acceptable. And she did this by urging people to use birth control, right? She had other motives for it. But the mere fact that you're saying birth control is the option and not abstinence means that you're acknowledging people can have sex and it's okay, you know? So that was a big deal for a lot of folks. It was the sign of kind of a shifting in the winds.

Now again, there were major eugenicist implications for a lot of her beliefs. But the positive angle of it is that she was increasingly pushing forward a conversation that said, it's okay if married men and women have sex for fun, you know? Which is something. In 1936, Sanger helped push forward a Supreme Court case that overturned the Comstock law, which had ruled both birth control devices and information about birth control obscene and thus illegal. So like talking about birth control was illegal because it was pornography, basically. Oh my God, that's so fucked up.

That's like the Instagram advertising policy of present day. Yeah, yeah, the Comstock law was that for everything. And Sanger helps overturn it. The Supreme Court is like, oh, you know, it turns out the first amendment means you can talk about condoms. Which is fun. I mean, it's a good law to overturn because it sucked. By the time James Burt was 17 or 18, he would have been able to finally receive sex ed information that wasn't entirely focused around syphilis or the evils of Wackenot.

James graduated in 1939 and went to Auburn University where he met his future wife Lucretia Perry. He received his undergraduate degree after a transfer from Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1942. He next attended medical school and he married Lucretia in the early 1940s before graduating with his medical degree in 1945. I haven't found good information on what precisely inspired James to get into medicine, but based on his later actions, we can safely assume that he found himself gravitating most to the subject of reproductive and sexual health. We know he paid close attention to developing sex research of the day. He would have followed the developing work of a sex science pioneer named Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was a former biologist who had gone from studying wasps to studying human sex

after he started teaching a course on marriage for Indiana University and realized that there was basically zero good research documenting the sex lives of normal humans. And Kinsey's a controversial figure too. There's some good criticisms of the guy. But his research is like, I love that that gets you a little bit harder. Robert, you're like, yeah, there's some there's some stuff about that guy too. There's there we might talk about there's some like weird weird shit with Kinsey like genital torture stuff that. What? Yeah, there's some weird shit with Kinsey. I'm not gonna I'm not competent at the moment to talk about it.

But like Kinsey, there's there's some very there's some very founded critiques of him. You also if you're studying like sex health, you have to talk about Kinsey because he was the first first person pushing this research. And I'm going to quote from an honors thesis by Lauren Lavin for the University of South Dakota here. In 1948, soon after beginning the Institute for Sex Research, Kinsey published one of the most influential pieces of literature in American sex history, sexual behavior of the human male. Five years later in 1953, he published sexual behavior of the human female. The books contained controversial information for the time as they detailed topics such as homosexuality, premarital sex and even bestiality. Yet this illicit information intrigued the public and the books quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

The most notably controversial information presented was the occurrence of homosexuality in America. At this point, homosexual acts were legal, yet Kinsey's reports detailed many people having homosexual encounters. He estimated that 10% of the population was homosexual. This statistic, now known to be higher than the actual percentage of 4.5%, was shocking to American citizens. The books also contained innovative new measures for sex research. The Kinsey scale, still used in sex research today, is a graduated scale from zero to six that measures the level of homosexual orientation in an individual, with zero being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual. The scale was an important finding in research as it provided the basis for homosexual research in a reliable way to measure homosexuality going forward.

And yeah, it's one of those things. Also, I don't want to say that like 4.5% is the definite percentage of homosexuality. Like, I don't think we have perfect data on that now. And Kinsey's data wasn't perfect, but he was the first person who was studying this and not condemning it. It was just like, this is the thing that people do. Let's try to understand it, you know? Which is, you get a lot of credit for that in my book. And again, like 1952, or 1948, 1948, sorry. Like, that's, he's very ahead of his time. Totally. Yeah. And he also like started carrying out, it wasn't just like the thing that kind of first brought into prominence was his kind of frank discussions of homosexuality.

But he started also discussing just like heterosexual sex life in a way that hadn't been before where it was just kind of trying to understand what people do and not judging it and not, not approaching it from any kind of moral or religious territory. Just, just, this is a thing people do. Let's try to understand how common different things are. When Kinsey's study went viral, James Burt was working for the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps, which he joined to avoid getting drafted. He did a residency next at a hospital in Chicago and eventually wound up performing his residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. He finally received his medical license in June of 1951 from the state of Ohio and moved back home to Dayton and the first of all would become a major series of poor decisions. This is a very anti Ohio podcast. I think we're open about that. Yep. You ever been to Ohio, Courtney?

First mistake. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone who's been knows. What a great response. I know some lovely people from Ohio. Oh sure. There's great people from everywhere. Yes. Yeah.

But not Ohio. It's not a prize. Should have been a lake is all I'll say. We don't have enough lakes and we have too much Ohio. That's all I'll say on the matter. Fair enough, Robert. James Burt started his own practice, which was focused on gynecology and obstetrics. And he started his practice the year before Kenzie wrote his book on female sexuality. Burt was not board certified in gynecology or in obstetrics, but that was not a barrier to practicing in those at the time.

I don't know if it is today, but at the time you could do as long as you were a doctor, you could practice gynecology and obstetrics without being board certified in them. So he starts his practice and less than a year later, he and his wife separate and he files for divorce. This was a fairly rare thing at the time, although not as rare as you'd think. The divorce rate in the 1950s was about 2.3 people for every thousand Americans compared to about 3.9 per every thousand Americans today. We've actually been seeing divorce rates decline over the last decade or so. We're at the same level we were in 1968, I think. Interesting. What was the reason for the divorce was he just like, I saw a lot of pussies this year.

We're going to talk about that. I got to get out. Yeah. The James Burt story involves a lot of divorce. So the couple had two sons and a daughter who seemed to have gone with their mother. I don't think he kept the kids. I haven't heard any sort of evidence that makes me believe the kids stayed with him. We know very little about their situation because again, he's divorcing her in the early 50s.

Women don't have a lot of legal aid. You can't have a bank account as a woman in that time. Totally. Oh my God. So yeah, we know that Burt was the one who filed for divorce. He claimed his wife was unhappy with his financial situation, but this could very well be a lie because he was making a lot of money at this point. He's a doctor, you know, and he's throughout his career a very successful one. This could also be a lie because in 1953, a few months after he filed for divorce, when the divorce was still pending,

James Burt traveled to Mexico, got a divorce in Mexico without his wife's involvement, and immediately married his second wife, Jerry, in Indiana. Oh shit. The first bitch just got a letter in the mail like, okay, we're done. We're Mexican divorced. It's taken too long in America. We're Mexico divorced. And this will come up later, but you can't do that.

If you're married in the United States and you file for divorce and then just decide to go to Mexico to get, it doesn't count. Like that's not the way the law works, you know? So this is technically bigamy. He's still married to his first wife when he marries his second wife. Is that true though? Sorry. That is fascinating. Can you not, like if I get, is that still true today?

If I get married in the United States, can I only get divorced in the United States? I don't know if you can only get divorced, but if you start divorce proceedings here and then move to another country without the consent of your spouse to get a divorce, it doesn't count, right? Yeah, seems like you would definitely need consent. Yeah. I'm sure you could like, if you were like, oh, well, I've moved, I've since moved to this other country. I'm going to initiate divorce proceedings here instead of initiating them. And I'm sure that would work, but it does not work the way he did it because he was clearly just fleeing to Mexico to get a piece of paper that said that he could get another. Like what he was doing was very deliberately shady, you know?

For sure. So Gary and James moved into a modern one-story house with a swimming pool in a wealthy suburban neighborhood of Dayton, which further undercuts his claim that his wife was unhappy with their finances because again, he was making a lot of money. I think he was just trying to say like, she's a gold digger. That's why we're splitting up, you know? And for things that come later, I'm certain he's lying about this first divorce. Yeah, what a lame trope, bro. So the couple had one child and for a few years, things seemed to be relatively normal for the young doctor and his growing family. But appearances were, in this case, deceiving.

A major part of James's job as an obstetrician involved repairing apesiatomies. At the time, the vast majority of women who birthed children went through an apesiatomy, which is a surgical cut made at the opening of the vagina to ease childbirth. This is not as common today, but back in those days doctors believed it made the birth safer. It was easier on the child's head and so it was the norm. In some hospitals, 85% of births included an apesiatomy. Now things are different. It's still done sometimes, but it was just like almost every doctor would just do it basically every time. It was just kind of the standard thing.

This makes it safer for the baby, so we're just going to cut her open. Now it was not strictly necessary in most births and again, there's a lot of people who will say like this was an injury and it was. It was like unnecessary surgery for a lot of people who received it. At the time, the reason this doctors would just do this, because doctors would not ask the mother before doing this. And this was not just an apesiatomy thing. At the time, consent was not a priority in medicine for anyone, men or women. Your doctor told you what you were going to get and you would do it. Doctors were probably the most trusted people in the country at this point.

It was a different era and it was just sort of the norm for a doctor to say, this is what needs to happen and for the patient to just kind of let it happen. And they wouldn't tell you a lot of the time. Like with an apesiatomy, they probably wouldn't say, here's what'll happen unless you specifically ask. Like it's just, well, you're going to have a child. I'm going to knock you out with drugs and do what's necessary to get the kid out, you know? That's how it worked at the time. We're going to talk a lot about the history of medical consent in this episode.

But it was not a thing in the 50s, right? Like just not a standard thing. Apesiatomies were so normal that physicians often did not discuss it at all prior to the birth. This was despite the fact that many women hated the operation, which was extremely painful and permanently altered many people's ability to enjoy vaginal sex after childbirth. In most obstetricians, Dr. Burt performed a lot of apesiatomies. And then as a matter of course, he would carry out a repair of the apesiatomy afterwards. You would try to fix it.

And there was like a saying that like you would give them an extra stitch, you know, to tighten things up. Totally. To make it more pleasurable. And the more he did this repair surgery. Gotta love the patriarchy. Yeah. Just inserting themselves at every stage. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, God. Let me fix it. Let me fix it. Let me fix it. Yeah. And I'm bringing all this up because James Burt is uniquely shitty among obstetricians in this period, but like they're all doing some shady stuff.

Like some stuff that we it wasn't shady by the standards of the day. But now now you you look at medical science and they appear to be like, okay, if that's a little messed up. Yeah. So the more he repaired apesiatomies, the more he started to have ideas. And I'm going to quote from a write up on the website medical bag to explain how what he started thinking about. We all know what happens when men have idea. Do not recommend.

Quote, the doctor believed that women lost all their part of their ability to have an orgasm following childbirth as a result of their vagina becoming too loose post delivery. Claiming that women's vaginas were, quote, large enough to drive a truck through sideways after childbirth. Oh, my God. That's Dr. Burt's writing on the map. I am. This is just stressing. It's going to get worse. Oh boy.

It's going to get worse. As it normally does on this podcast. As it does a hundred percent of the time on this show. Drive a truck through sideways. Drive a truck through sideways. That is what the doctor wrote. Don't miss your words, buddy. No, no.

But you know what? Where you going with that, buddy? A lot of trucks because global capitalism is heavily reliant upon semis in order to transport goods and services across great distances. I mean, you really pulled that shit together. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Would that be the products and services that support this podcast? Absolutely is the products and services that support this podcast during the summer of 2020. Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. We're back and we're just not going to think too much about that ad transition. So, yeah, Dr. Burke decided to fix all that. Between 1954 and 1966, Burke began experimenting on unknowing unconscious patients with his own variations of the standard apesiotomy repair after childbirth. Known for his heavy hand with anesthesia, Burke had human cancers on which to experiment after delivery. He's a knock them out doctor and he just starts fiddling around in there, you know, just kind of like experimenting. Were these the days of operating theaters or was that over? Was he like, come on in, boys. She's totally knocked out and I'm going to try a few things.

He's on his own, I think. I think sometimes he has nurses, but he's on his own. Now, the exact nature of the surgeries he carried out varied over time. At first, he mostly focused on making the vaginal opening tighter to try and make vagina smaller and tighter and improve the sexual experience of the husbands of his patients, mainly. But in the late 1950s, Dr. Burke started reading the then newly published work of William Masters in Virginia, Johnson. Their work was groundbreaking for many reasons, but among them was the scientific data it provided on the fact that the clitoris played a key role in causing orgasms. Dr. Burke synthesized this finding with his own findings over years of experimental apesiotomy repairs. The women he'd given his modified surgery to, he claimed, told him their sexual experience had improved after childbirth. James Burke began to develop his own theories about human vaginas and sexual responsiveness.

From a book titled The Love Surgeon by Sarah Rodriguez, quote, central to Burke's ideas about female sexuality in the surgery he was developing were his ideas about the role of the clitoris in female orgasm. Prior to very recently, Burke wrote, the medical consensus had been that a vaginal orgasm was mature and orgasm from manipulation of the clitoris was immature, and thus the ultimate return of the vagina to normal by repair after child birthing was completed seemed adequate. But this, he noted, did not consider the role of the clitoris. So in 1963, nearly a decade into his casual experimenting with vaginas, James Burke's second wife filed for divorce. Since she is the one who filed, we're able to look at this divorce through the lens of someone besides Dr. Burke.

Gary reported that her husband had, quote, struck and physically abused her from time to time. Yeah, she asked that her husband be kept away from her and that their mutually held assets be protected from him. This was not an amicable divorce. James fought back claiming that he ought not have to pay his wife alimony because, and this is just an incredible line of argument, his divorce from his first wife still had not been legally completed in the United States, and thus his marriage to Gary had never been technically legal.

So that's his defense to paying alimony is, well, I got married to her illegally. I was breaking the law and we got married. So why would I pay alimony? He's like, however the paperwork lines up to best serve me. Do we know if he did any fucked up stuff to her vagina? We do not. She had kids with him. So probably. But I don't know. I have not run into confirmation that also maybe not because it is kind of uncommon,

at least now I assume it was then too for doctors to, you know, deliver their own children, right? Like that's considered like maybe not the best idea. So maybe it was someone else who did it and he didn't have a chance to get in there. I don't know. I haven't seen any sort of confirmation or denial of that, but it was definitely not not a friendly divorce. The judge was not convinced by this line of argument, which is honestly kind of surprising for the time, but he awarded Gary alimony and child support and their divorce was finalized in 1966. That same year, Masters and Johnson published a book,

Human Sexual Response, which dedicated an entire chapter to the clitoris, which they labeled, quote, a unique organ in the total of human anatomy, because its only purpose was sexual. They described it as an organ system which is totally limited in physiologic function to initiating or elevating levels of sexual tension, which was a big finding at the time. And it kind of like it went against a lot of the existing ideas about female sexuality, which had often just sort of seen that it was like, it was a variant of male sexuality, right? Like female sexuality is just kind of like a lesser version of male sexuality.

Women don't enjoy sex as much. Like it's not as big a deal for them. They're not sexual beings in the way that men are. And the Masters and Johnson's research kind of blows that out of the water, because like women are the only, like have an entire organ that's just dedicated to sexual responsiveness. Yeah, it's pretty great. It's great. So this is like an important sort of in the history of like understanding human sexuality. This idea that like, no, human beings are all sexual beings as opposed to like,

it's just people with, you know, penises. Yeah, so outside of that, yeah, this was like a bombshell in medical science at the time. And Dr. Burt was as influenced by this finding as everyone else. Unfortunately, he also fell into a failure of deduction that similarly plagued Dr. William Masters. Both men were physicians, and as a result, they both saw sex and issues with sex in strictly physical and conventionally medical terms. The social aspects of sexual dysfunction, like unequal power dynamics or abuse within a relationship were boiled out.

It was just purely a matter of like, oh, these are how the mechanics of sex work. And it's like, well, it's not just a matter of hydraulics, you know, there's a lot that goes on in sex. Female sexual problems then were blamed on purely physical matters. And I'm going to quote again from the love surgeon here. According to Burt, he had not informed any of these women, the women he'd done surgery on, that he had done anything other than a standard apesiatomy repair. The combination of realizing the importance of the clitoris in sex for women and that the modification he had made to apesiatomy repair

was improving the sex lives of his patients led Burt to conclude that women's bodies were not anatomically ideal for heterosexual sex. For Burt, female bodies were pathological when it came to heterosexual intercourse. Based on the research of Masters and Johnson and the information about the improved sex lives he stated he heard from his patients, Burt decided the clitoris was too far from the opening of the vagina for women to receive adequate stimulation from the penis during heterosexual missionary position sex.

So, he's got notes. Oh my God, amazing. A little bit of feedback for God or nature, whoever fucking made this. You did it wrong. Don't worry, I got it figured out. Yeah, that's amazing hubris. Like, that's a whole, a whole nother level. Like, it's something else. So, yeah, he started to modify the, again, significant surgical procedure

he'd already been performing on his patients without consent for more than a decade. Up to that point, he'd mostly focused on making the vagina tighter. Now, he started building up skin tissue in order to move the vaginal opening closer to the clitoris. This procedure also changed the angle of the vaginal opening. Burt later bragged that under what he started calling his love surgery, quote, the vagina is, yeah, I know, it's so mad, right? God, dammit. The love surgery.

Like, you just need to learn how to eat a pussy and then this will all just go away. No, no, no, no. That is not at all acceptable to Dr. James Burt. It is, I mean, it's a matter of like, there's a lot that, we'll talk about this more. There's a lot that's wrapped up in it. Sort of it is just this mix of men wanting to feel like they're sexual dynamos and also men not wanting to do anything but missionary sex. And so the whole, the whole idea that Burt has is like, well,

I'll just make it easier for women to orgasm from purely missionary sex. And that will make men, that will improve relationships because men will be sexual powerhouses then. Like that, it's this idea of like, well, I shouldn't have to learn to pleasure my partner. I'll alter her physiology. Oh my God, just five surgeries later, it'll be perfect. It was usually just one nine hour surgery if that makes it better. Oh, okay.

So yeah, he moved the vagina towards the clitoris. He also pulled a significant amount of the labia minora into the vagina. Oh my God. To make it pretty? No, he thought it would cause greater stimulation during vaginal sex. I say that he's doing all these things and he says he's getting feedback. He's not telling these women what he's doing. So he's not being like, so I did all this stuff to your bits.

How does it feel? He was just like, how's sex after childbirth? And they'd be all like, oh, it's a lot better than it was, you know, when I was pregnant. He'd be like, oh, that means the surgery works. He's not asking them, how about this? How about, he's not like getting, he's not even getting, not that it would be okay if he was, but he's not actually getting scientific data on this. He's just being like, they say sex is better, it must work.

So he doesn't know, he's saying that I know my surgery is improving sex. He doesn't know if it's, number one, he doesn't actually know that it's improving sex. They might just be like, yeah, now that I don't have, you know, I'm no longer pregnant, I'm enjoying sex more, which could make sense. He's not, he doesn't know if like, oh, is moving the opening or moving the clitoris or is moving the labia minora. Like what is it that's improving things if any of it's having an impact? Cause he's not actually doing science.

He's just kind of futzing around down there. Did he get any complaints? We don't know yet. He does. Okay. This is the sixties. So he's calling it love surgery, but isn't telling any of his patients what he's doing. He is not telling any of his patients at this point what he's doing.

His research is, hey, you were pregnant and now you're not, how's the sex? Yeah. And it's self-reported. So like if he did get some complaints, he's probably not going to tell other people about that. Exactly. So like, no offense, but I'm not out here like talking to my OB being like, yeah, sex, great. Well, yeah, especially, and that's 2021, like not in the sixties. And if you, I'm sure some, cause some of these women do later go to other doctors to be like,

what has happened to me? And I'm going to guess that happened at this period, but a lot of those doctors are like, well, it's just pregnancy, you know, pregnancy, change of stuff down there, leave, like get out of my office. You know, like there's nothing I can do for you. This is just what happens. What a nightmare. Yeah.

It's horrible. It's got to get worse. Of course it is. So bring it on. Yeah. In 1967, James Burt finally succeeded in getting a legal divorce from his first wife so he could marry his third wife, Linda. By this point, he was one of the most successful and thus wealthiest obstetricians in Ohio.

He and his new wife bought property in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. I'm sure nothing shady. With either of those transactions, they also bought a condo in Vale, Colorado, so they wouldn't have to spend as much time in the blighted hellscape that is Ohio. With Dayton, within Dayton, the Burt's gained a reputation for being ostentatious and somewhat kinky rich people. They held huge pool parties that were swimsuit optional. James Burt wore gold chains and long fur coats in the winter.

On at least one occasion, he wore a pink safari suit at one of the parties he threw. Are there photos? Not that I found. He was not particularly social with or popular among his fellow doctors. One of his colleagues bluntly stated that James didn't enjoy golf because he, quote, preferred indoor games. And you can translate that however you want. Yeah.

So he's like a kind of, probably kind of like a swinger dude in this period. I'm guessing a lot of key parties at the Burt residence, you know? Sure. In 1973, James's third marriage fell apart when Linda left her husband for a ski instructor she'd met in Vale. Yes! Yes! Karma is real!

Maybe. So not really. Because it's unclear if she left him before or after he started living with a 21-year-old. Oh. I know every little bit of hope. He was 46 at the time. In short order, he duly married this much younger woman whose name was Joan. And they stayed together for a while.

To his credit, he did wait until after he and his third wife had a legal divorce to get married to his fourth wife. Joan and James bought a yacht on Lake Erie. She wore diamonds constantly. The couple did not grow any more popular among James's colleagues. Walter Reeling, Jr., a Dayton physician who worked near Dr. Burt, later claimed that other doctors and their spouses avoided the Burt's at social gatherings in the 70s. No one, he claims, wanted to sit at a table with them.

Sarah Rodriguez writes, quote, Partly this was because of the manner in which the Burt's behaved at such dinners. Both Walter Reeling and his wife, Susie Reeling, recollected how Joan Burt, decked out in furs, would be physically all over her husband during medical society dinners. Talking a lot and bragging about how many orgasms she enjoyed. James Burt apparently did not seek out friendships with other physicians. And Walter Reeling could not recall a physician who sought out Burt's friendship. So a lot of PDA that everyone finds kind of creepy, right?

Sex positive here, but if you're like sitting at a dinner talking about how often you orgasm, like a professional dinner with your colleagues, kind of weird. Kind of weird. Kind of weird. Kind of weird. Not the time for that kind of conversation, you know? There are times. But he's an OB.

This is related to work. Yeah, like, because he thinks he's like Jordan Belfort and like the wolf of Wall Street, the wife with the diamonds on the yacht. Like, bro. He's got strong Jordan Belfort energy. Yeah, it's literally when I'm like, dog, come on, bro. By the mid 1970s, Dr. Burt had added yet another step to his love surgery. Some of his patients had complained of pain during sex after his operation.

No, really? He decided to moan, yeah. Oh, no, yeah. Wow. Now, obviously, it couldn't be that his operation was a bad idea. It had to be that there was yet another problem with female anatomy that needed to be corrected. He decided the most likely culprit was the pubococcygeus muscle, which is a constrictor muscle at the rear wall of the vagina that supports the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes,

bowel, bladder, and vagina. This is the organ that you control when you do kegels, right? That's the muscle that he decides is the problem. It is extremely important. It provides control not over just vaginal feeling, but urination and defecation. It's a very important muscle to have. James cut it because he decided it was getting hit during penetrative intercourse and causing pain, which made it harder for his patients to orgasm.

Again, none of them told him to do this, nor was he carrying out medical research to determine if the pubococcygeus muscle was in fact interfering with sexual pleasure. He just sort of assumed it was the culprit and, in his words, decided to, quote, cut the damn muscle. Oh, my God. Pretty bad. Yeah, I come real easy, but cannot stop wetting myself and shitting everywhere. Which might have an impact on, I don't know, a lot of things. It wasn't like he's not totally severing it, but he's severing it enough that it does cause

problems with incontinence and stuff for a lot of his patients. We'll talk about that later. So later on, once knowledge of his love surgery was public, many of his patients would come forward with complaints that love surgery had made them incontinent. We don't know what percentage of them suffered this way because in the mid-70s, he still was not telling anyone what he was doing. This was now 20 years into his experiments with love surgery. Yeah, so we don't know what percentage of his patients suffered incontinence as a result of the

surgery because in the mid-1970s, he still wasn't telling anyone what he was doing. And this is now 20 years into his experimenting with love surgery. Burt, of course, claims to have heard almost universally positive reports from his patients about their post-childbirth sex lives. By 1975, he claims to have performed his love surgery on more than 4,000 women. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's some good shit. It's not.

It's terrible. It's some bad shit. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of people getting surgery that absolutely did not ask for. That is the size of my hometown. Yeah, that is a town worth of, that's most of Ohio, I have to assume. But you know what isn't most of Ohio? I don't even know where, go ahead.

I mean, Ohio does advertise on our show. After all, I was going to say we could get an Ohio ad and you could be factually wrong. And for the record, if there's an Ohio ad, don't listen to it. Do not move to Ohio under any circumstances. Just get on out of there. Like, Ohio, know your audience. This is a firmly anti-Ohio hot. Yeah, profoundly anti-Ohio.

You're wasting your money here. Yeah, Ohio. Yeah. I mean, less money for Ohio is a win for the whole world. But still, I just don't want anyone to move there. Anyway, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

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And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

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My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. So yeah, Dr. James Bird is a liar, obviously, so we should take his claims that he performed a surgery on more than 4,000 women with a grain of salt. Because there's not documentation of this. But he was one of the most, if not the most popular obstetricians and Dayton in his day.

So it's a lot. He experimented probably in the low, probably at least a couple thousand. Four thousands, probably an exaggeration. He's a narcissist. But two thousands not out of the possibility. He's been at it for like a decade, right? 20 years. He's done this a lot. And he was one of the most successful obstetricians in the whole Midwest at this point. And the average salary of a doctor in this period is like 62,000 a year, which is really good money in the 1960s, 70s. He's making like 400 grand a year. Holy shit. He's extremely successful. His office was on the top floor of a stylish downtown building.

He had eight exam rooms and a waiting room, which included a couch shaped like a woman's mouth. A little bit creepy. It must be said that he was very popular with his patients. Dr. Burt was charming, friendly, and said to have exceptional bedside manner. He listened to his patients in an era in which male doctors were generally expected to ignore the complaints and fears of their female patients. One nurse later recalled that he, quote, communicated with women when a lot of doctors wouldn't. There were a lot of physicians that were patting women on the head and saying, now, sweetie, don't worry. I'll take care of it. And Dr. Burt was not that kind. He would explain to you what he was.

He wouldn't tell you what he was actually doing, but he would explain to you what he was claiming he was going to do. He would make you feel good about handing over all the power. He would make you feel listened to before performing a surgery on you that you did not ask for. And did not know was even a thing that could be done. Patients would often claim his office was a refuge. Dr. Burt would listen to their fears about childbirth and sexual dysfunction, which was not a subject most doctors would even broach. Sara Rodriguez writes, Burt seemed to sympathize with his patients.

Burt's sympathetic ear perhaps appealed to many women as he listened to their worries and fears about their upcoming labors or hysterectomies. And he seems to have believed that he was acting sympathetically toward them by performing love surgery in addition to delivering their child or performing a hysterectomy. In his view, Burt surgically altered their bodies to alleviate their concerns and problems, all of which, regardless of what the women may have been telling or not telling him, he felt were essentially about sex. Yeah, that's good stuff. So Dr. Burt, of course, performed his love surgery after nearly every childbirth, even on women who never complained to him about having sexual problems. He performed his love surgery after vaginal hysterectomies too and regularly when performing abdominal uterus suspension. So he was just, he stopped just doing this after apesiodomies after.

You get a surgery and you get a surgery and you get a surgery. And like, again, is not an OB surgeon, right? I feel like that needs to be stated over and over and that is not his, like he's not trained. Yeah, I mean, he's trained. He's not board certified. Like you get training, I guess. He's not trained. Yeah, this is not the thing he should be doing. At the time, it is not illegal for him to be doing this, which is a flaw in, I think, the medical system in this period. I mean, for fuck's sake, what the hell?

Yeah, as a general rule, if a patient with a vagina was unconscious in front of him, he would, he would, he would do his love surgery. Like that, that was kind of his like, you're knocked out. Don't get drunk around this guy. He's a Christ man. One thing that endeared him to his patients were his promises of aid. I'm sorry, what? What? He was, yeah, he was extremely popular during this period.

Sophie, all you have to do is listen to women. But he's, yeah, like he's, he's meeting the lowest bar, which is he's not like patting them on the head and saying, they're there, girl. This is like, this is adult time. Like that's what a lot of male doctors do, and he doesn't. He sits there and he listens and he takes it serious. And then he does whatever it is he wants. He's not, he's a monster. Oh yeah, I hear you. Let me, let me, let me cut you up real quick. Like what the fuck?

Yeah, he's, I mean, yes, but like it is important to the story that he's popular during this period. That's part of why he gets so many women to experiment on us. He's extremely popular and extremely successful. You can look up his face. I don't want to. There's pictures of him. Yeah, you know, he's, he's like it, it's important that he was so endearing to his patients because that's why they trusted him. And that's why so few of them initially like recognize that something was awry. He was very popular in part for his promises of pain free childbirth, which he accomplished by giving expectant mothers huge doses of drugs that rendered them unconscious throughout the whole process.

This was not uncommon for the time. And it gave birth the ability to more easily do whatever he wanted with his patients who were again canvases to him. By this point, he had come to believe that all female bodies needed fixing because they were badly designed for heterosexual missionary position sex, which he considered the only normal sex act. He believed he was justified in performing his surgery on every vagina he got his hands on because he did not see his surgery as elective. Instead, he was correcting a malformation. He thought of it the same way as like a doctor who corrects a cleft palate, right? That's what's going on in this guy's head. Sometimes he would even lie to his patients for a chance to get in there and root around from the New York Times, quote,

Miss Phillips was one of the many women who went to Dr. Burt for a relatively minor physical problem. She was told she needed a hysterectomy because her fallopian tubes were rotting. Now she suffers chronic infections, extreme difficulty urinating and excruciating pain if she attempts intercourse. The strain eventually eventually destroyed her marriage, she said. Seven hours of surgery completely changed her life. I feel like a freak, Miss Phillips said. I can't date. I can't ride horses. I can't urinate. She characterized surgery as a form of sexual abuse and said he stole parts of my body, which is fair. Yeah.

That is not. There's no jokes even. That's so sad. No, there's not a joke. It's a nightmare. It's a horrible, horrible man who did horrible things in the name of medicine to women who trusted him implicitly. Trust no one, women. Trust no one. Certainly not a gynecologist who wears fur coats. That auto would be a warning sign. Gynecologists who worked in and around Dr. Burt knew about his surgery and recognized it because they would often examine his former patients. Joy Martin, who was a woman he performed his surgery on after delivering her son in 1974, said,

doctors would say, Dr. Burt's done surgery on you, hasn't he? Yeah, because like they would see like she would go in with, she went in with complaints and was like, it feels like something's wrong and they'd be like, oh yeah, you had Dr. Burt. He switched the holes. I don't. They knew what he was doing. It is important to note that while James Burt went much further than any of his colleagues, he was not alone in his obsession with making female bodies better suited for heterosexual intercourse. Joseph Dilley, an early 20th century obstetrician who helped popularize the episiotomy,

recommended this surgery in its subsequent repair because it could tighten the vagina and, quote, restore women to virginal conditions. In the 1970s, author and childbirth expert, Suzanne Arms, would argue that the real reason for this procedure was to increase the ability of husbands to enjoy sex after childbirth. In other words, Dr. Burt and his colleagues frame their various tightening surgeries as being done for women, but their real purpose was to make things more enjoyable for men. By the mid-1970s, public discussion of loose post-childbirth vaginas had become common in popular culture. In 1974, in his bestselling book, How to Get More Out of Sex, psychiatrist David Rubin urged mothers to get vaginal tightening surgery,

calling it a simple procedure that could make a woman of 40 almost the same sexually as a girl of 18. No. That's pretty problematic, yeah. Yeah, not great. That's like on the news. Where is that happening? Yeah, that is a book, How to Get More Out of Sex by psychiatrist David Rubin. Like, that's a mainstream pop psychiatrist being like, get tightened up so you'll be like a teenager. Men love teenagers, you know? It's pretty bad. He claimed surgery could turn back the clock and turn post-birth vaginas from the carol's bad caverns and back into, and I'm so sorry that I have to read this phrase, and back into the penis's little grotto of pleasure.

Oh, my fucking god. David Rubin, everybody. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. Bad and bad. Bad and bad, for sure. So, divorce rates started to raise during the 1970s, and in 1976, a Cosmopolitan article noted that popular myth blamed some of this on loose vaginas. It argued that one way to keep a couple from splitting up was to, quote, tighten up the vagina in order to enhance the pleasure of intercourse. This article also explicitly urged women to get surgery, saying that while kegels could help, they were unlikely to go far enough. You wouldn't hesitate to go to a doctor for surgery and a faulty appendix, so why hesitate when the happiness of your sexual life may be at stake?

Oh, my fucking god. It's pretty bad. Now, I want to note that an awful lot of mothers got variations on this surgery on their own recognizance and had wonderful experiences. It's still not an uncommon thing to do after childbirth today, and I'm not condemning the practice, pointing out the extremely sexist way in which it was presented, and in which men tended to urge it, because that's important context for why Dr. Burt didn't really think he was doing anything people would have issues with. By the late 1970s, he'd started circumcising his patient's clitorises in order to expose more of the organ and make it more easily stimulated by sexual intercourse. From the love surgeon, quote, doctors understood the sexual nature of the clitoris and its importance to female sexual pleasure,

and thus some blamed the clitoris for a woman's failure to orgasm with her husband. The removal of the clitoral hood was an attempt to fix this concern. Beginning in the late 19th century, at a time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex was increasingly seen as an important component of a healthy marriage, physicians performed female circumcision to help married women who wanted, or whose husbands wanted, their wives to have, orgasms during vaginal sex. This is also very important. Without understanding this, it might actually look like Dr. Burt, by performing love surgery, was showing more care for the sex lives of his patients than the men urging them to tighten up to avoid divorce. His surgery was focused on giving women more orgasms, but for a profoundly selfish reason.

So their husbands would feel like they were good at sex without needing to do foreplay or, God forbid, perform oral sex. See, all of the improvements Dr. Burt made weren't actually correcting deficiencies in the vagina. They were correcting deficiencies with standard missionary sex. Many women, maybe even most women, won't regularly orgasm from simple missionary sex alone. This is why foreplay and oral sex and other fucking positions are good things to try. Dr. Burt thought all of that was abnormal and thus bad, right? The whole goal is for them to come from this, right? From the kind of sex that lazy men in the 60s most want to give them.

How's he going to be a missionary-style swinger, though? That's what I want to know. I don't know that he was a swinger. I'm guessing, right? Maybe he was not. Okay, those people should have exposed him to some more positions. Yeah, he seems like the kind of guy who was bad enough at sex that he had to perform a legal surgery in order to please somebody, you know? It's not great. It's not great. I love when men are like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not me. It's not me. It has to be the structure of a vagina. There's no way I could bend over and stroke it this way. Jesus Christ, man.

There's not a whole family of tools that have been invented to aid me in this endeavor. There's not a whole wide variety of things. Like, if I can't please you in the laziest way possible, it's time for serious multi-hour-long surgery. By the mid-1970s, James Burt felt that he had finally perfected his surgery. He was ready to share it with the world. So in 1975, he and his wife, Joan, co-authored a book ticket. Yeah, they wrote a book. They wrote a book. Joan was fully drinking the Kool-Aid, but she didn't know any better because she was fucking 25 years younger.

Yeah, yeah, it's not great. The book was titled, I apologize for this too, Surgery of Love. Now, this was not a medical manual. It was more of a pop medical text that functioned primarily as an advertisement for his love surgery. It is, I feel comfortable saying, one of the most offensive documents ever published. In part two, we'll talk about what it said. But that is going to be the end of the episode for today. Courtney, how are you feeling?

Shook. One word. Just this is, this is a whole, this is, he sucks. He sucks. And also you have to be so careful who you entrust your pussy to. And I feel like that still stands today. Forever. Yeah, it does. You want to plug any plugables?

Yeah, Corey. I have a podcast about sex. We talk about pleasurable sex on my podcast, Private Parts Unknown. So if you need a little pick me up after this, go check it out. Yeah, check out, check that out, and check out, I don't know, the history of surgical abuse and problems with consent and medicine. Check that out on our next episode, actually. Woo!

Podcast. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.